This thread is to provide general updates from the "What is a Sudoku?" committee.

Recently activity in the forum has died down a bit, and this has been in no small part due to myself being very busy at work in January and having taken a holiday to recover at the start of February. I will be posting more frequently over the next few works, attempting to finish the exploration of examples, and to continue some of the interesting discussions that have already been started.

Beyond this I will the be looking to draw some conclusions about what properties a Sudoku puzzle definitely should have, and what a Sudoku puzzle shouldn't have - and also to attempt to complete a classification of the different constraints that different Sudoku Variants might employ.

It's not much of an announcement to say that this process has been on hold for the last couple of months. I've been having a hard time of it with my job and I'm generally feeling depressed and drained of energy when I do get some time to myself. Whilst in theory this is supposed to be a committee, I feel like I've received little practical support or any kind of proactive initiative from anyone else who signed up. I feel like the whole thing is in great danger of going the same way as the previous committee, which managed to achieve the square root of sod all. I would like to achieve more than that, even if that means acting as a committee of one from this point forward.

So I'd like to try and be constructive and outline how I see the rest of this playing out.

Over the next month or so my focus will be on putting together the UKSC. There probably won't be any more movement until after that's finished in early June.

After that's done and dusted I will draft the "What is a Sudoku?" report, trying to take into account all the discussion and examples that everyone has contributed so far. I had kind of anticipated doing a lot of work on the report myself anyway - but it certainly looks like if I don't write the report then no-one will.

I anticipate that being ready sometime in July. I'll post the report to this forum and look to get as much reaction to it as possible.

Under the "committee of one" assumption I don't think I can hope to please everyone, but assuming the report is reasonably well received, I'll work in this reaction as best as I can before finalising the report for the WPF.

On the other hand there's a (hopefully small) danger that no-one likes it after the draft stage. In which case I'll inform the WPF that I'm stepping down, and if someone else feels they can do a better job then they are more than welcome to pick things up. Hopefully it won''t come to that!